Every DWK release is a reason to celebrate. The label has proven its flawless taste in beats for the past 12 years or so. One gets used to such high quality levels. Yet I'm still surprised at the way some of its Artists occasionally manage to beat that level and reach an even higher height on the scale of perfection. Then I end up with goosebumps, mumbling something like "the bastards, how did they manage to pull that off!".

Auditive Escape's "Polychrome" is way beyond the high expectations the DWK listener is accustomed to. Which is sort of amazing!

The album starts with a sweet ambient offering that cleverly sets the mood for the tracks to come. Yes, you will have grooves and beats... but the journey will be emotional and drowned in summer light.
This is confirmed right away by Yurtifale, where a 3/4 rhythm lays the foundation for a exhilarating, guitar-driven trip that the hippie movement would have embraced without restriction. It's fresh, effective and perfectly executed. By that track I thought: "hey, even if the other tracks are not as good it'll still be a strong album".

But the A Day comes and you know you're not done with this yet. Thought we move back to the standard 4/4 groovy beats we all love, the mood is preserved: laid back, love-spreading and as ethereal as the drowsiness one feels before taking a nap during a summer's lazy afternoon.
Cyclic Hymns maintains this ambience with its synth pads-based introduction, accompanied by bird singing and subtle noises of water, hinting at a nearby river, while the ethereal guitars keep on churning out their sweet melodies.
This winning combination is repeated again for a bucolic Shorelake, while Autophusius brings us back to dreamy, jazz-inspired grooves typical of DWK.

One of my favorites from the lot has to be Fluvial Aspen, which combines an hypnotic 3/4 rhythm (similar to Yurtifale's) with two guitars playfully fighting to grab the listener's attention. Then a sweet female voice's sung melody is brought in, giving that last push that makes the track take off and fly. It's gorgeous and creative, far from what the music industry majors are proposingthese days.

The last two tracks, Epsilon and Cold Thought bring us back down to reality with their grounded but classy beats, until Des Voiles Ment closes the journey with an evocative ambient piece that may take you back to distant child memories... Well that's what it did for me!

To say that I loved this EP is an understatement. There are some albums (vinyl, CD or digital) that I keep close because I know they are able to "put me back on track": Spacer's Sensory Man, Biosphere's Substrata, almost any album from Radiohead... Now I'll have to add Auditive Escape's "Polychrome" to the "exceptional" stack.